People seem to ask me pretty regularly about current themes I see in photography, and although I don’t like to categorize, I will say that I saw a lot of work dealing with contemporary landscape – human intervention, neglect, urbanization. . . And I learned a new word!  ”Dross” – ok, now that I used the google, the definition isn’t exactly as it was explained to me by one of the many photographers dealing with this topic, but as I learned it, dross is the in-between space in the landscape – places that have fallen away from use or that are coming into use.  Dross.  Photograph that.  (or don’t, since lots of others are getting that covered. . .)

So dross aside, I’d like to highlight just a few images/photographers that peaked my interest.  Some of this work is finished and ready to launch, and other portfolios are still working out issues and growing, but these are just few that I keep thinking about.

This image by Amelia Morris made me cry:

I pretty much loved everything about Marico Fayre, including this really meditative series, White:

This project, Kids With Guns: The Childhood Gravity Games by Kim Campell intruiged me – I think it’s going somewhere. . .

K. K. Depaul‘s mixed-media collage and assemblage pieces about secrets was wonderfully haunting:

A lot of talent always shows up for this review, and Portland of course is my love, so the whole time there was wonderful, start to finish.

A Soft Place to Land (2012)

in her words. . .

One of the biggest inspirations for my work is music. While driving back home from a visit with my parents, a song came on the radio that immediately caught my attention. “I’m looking for a soft place to land, the forest floor, the palm of your hand.” I saw a woman deep in the forest on a mattress. I didn’t hear the song again but that visual stayed with me. When an image haunts me, my only choice is to release it into the world as a photograph.

Six months after hearing the song all the elements were finally in place. I wanted an old mattress for the color and a deep forest to shoot. Luckily all those elements were available in or around my parents’ home. My dad and I loaded the heavy mattress (turns out vintage mattresses are much more dense than new ones) on top of the car and drove it down to the perfect wooded area. With my husband and dad holding the mattress from behind for support, I jumped and contorted into all sorts of positions, defying gravity, sleeping while standing (all while using a remote and throwing it down at the last second). After clicking the shutter for the last time and loading the heavy mattress back onto the car, I felt a release, an exhale, until the next visual sneaks in.

To view more of Heather’s work, click here.

Critical Mass, a program of Photolucida, is about exposure and community. The idea is simple—photographers (from anywhere) submit a 10 image portfolio. This work is then pre-screened by a committee of approximately 20 great jurors. From those votes, the 200 top Finalists are determined, whose work then goes on to a jury of approximately 200 of the world’s best photography professionals who have agreed to view and vote on the Finalists’ work. Using these votes, at least one photographer is chosen to receive a book award, as well as solo shows throughout the country.

Click here to see the all 50 of the winning artists.

Blue Ridge Paper Mill (December 2008)

in his words. . .

In 2006 when I was in the very early stages of shooting the work for Watershed I drove into the town of Canton, North Carolina. The town is unusual for this area of Western North Carolina in that a paper mill dominates much of the valley the town resides in.  I was very surprised by the size of the plant and was interested in how the Pigeon River flowed right through the middle of the land occupied by the mill. I made a photograph of the mill that day and decided to research the history of the plant. 

I found that the plant actually had a very controversial history. Opened in 1908 as Champion Fiber Company, the plant is now owned by Evergreen Packaging.  This plant was the subject of intense protest in the 1980s and early 1990s, because of the pollution of the Pigeon River, the main water source of the plant.  The bleaching process used to make paper releases many chemicals into the water and causes it to smell like rotten eggs and turns the Pigeon river the color of sweet tea.  Starting in the late 1980s due to the public outcry the plant began to implement measures to clean up the plant.  Today, although the plant is much cleaner than the past century, there are still problems with water quality and as a result there is still a significant public outcry.

Over the next two years whenever I was in the area I would take additional images of the plant in order to document the industrial landscape of the area.  However, something seemed to be missing, I was never quite satisfied with the images I captured. Finally on a cold morning in December of 2008, I set up my camera before dawn and started shooting. I made several photographs that morning, but the one that I decided to use was shot a minute or so after the sun came up from behind a mountain. As I was watching the mill, the sun lit up the whole landscape and I realized this scene of fog and steam was the image that I’d been imagining as the most descriptive of this plant and it’s effect on the surrounding landscape.

To view more of Jeff’s work, click here.

In September of 2011, my cousin and I traveled Money Road near Greenwood, MS hopping from farm to farm to photograph cotton farmers.  I’d begun the project in July of 2011, and I spent most of September in my dad’s truck doing follow-up visits and photographing the farms that dot the rural highways around Greenwood. Just over the Tallahatchie River bridge which leads into Greenwood is Ashwood Plantation- Billy and Avery Whittington’s place.  Billy was burning off the old corn stalks on this particular afternoon to prepare the fields for planting cotton the following year. The fields were burning for miles and smoke traveled well into Greenwood.  (Billy is also one of the only farmers who uses International brand tractors, so all the local farmers know this is his place when they see the image.)   I encountered the scene by happenstance- heading up Money Road to visit farmers.  I shot several rolls of film standing in the midst of that smoke and then spent the next few weeks recovering from the inhalation. The field where this image was made is just a few blocks from my parents’ house (the house where I grew up). 

More about the series,In Cotton:

I grew up in the rural Mississippi Delta; infamous for its checkered past and renowned for its fertile soil – the sandy loam deposited by the great river and its tributaries. My late grandfather, a third generation cotton farmer, spoke of this dirt as though it were a sacred mixture. In 2010 corn and beans were planted on my family’s farm in place of cotton for the first time in 120 years. I noticed this shift developing elsewhere in the delta landscape a few years prior. The horizon, which is historically visible to its very limits, was beginning to disappear behind a wall of stalks.

The contemporary delta suffers from an existential malaise wavering between myth and reality, past and present. An exodus began in the 1940s with the mechanization of farming, and the population continues to decline. Schools are disappearing. Convenience stores are gone. Farm communities are dissolving.

Beginning in 2011, I traveled familiar long, straight roads through the Delta photographing those who reside on rural farmland and continue to farm cotton. In Cotton explores the tension between time and memory, place and identity. The photographs of interior and exterior spaces are intertwined and implicit. One cannot exist without the other. A few houses still sit on the edge of a cotton field, stretching to the horizon, while some are newly contained within walls of corn. These farms have names- some inherited, some given: Roebuck, Long Last, Buckhorn, New Hope, Due West, Ashland; and as Eudora Welty wrote, their names “put a kind of poetic claim on (their) existence.” And while most have left these remote places for larger delta towns or southern cities, the people in these photographs are some of the few who remain.

To view more of Kathleen’s work, click here.

3 Ways Email Newsletters Help Photographers Tell A Story

We have many photographers using Mad Mimi for email marketing, and we’ve seen many of their newsletters over the years. Nearly all of them have a good eye for design, with strong visuals and creative use of color. However, if there’s one aspect of email marketing that photographers often neglect… it’s the story.

Here are three ways that you can use your email newsletters to tell a compelling story that compliments your striking images.

1. Develop The Characters

portion of a Mad Mimi newsletter with gorgeous images and clean design, as well as some solid storyline

Email newsletters are an opportunity to share the story behind the subject of your photograph, whether you describe the characters captured or how you came to take that photograph. Why it appeals to you is appealing to others and the newsletter is a place to tell that story.

2. Technique Is Fascinating

Newsletters are a great place for photographers to totally geek out. Fellow photographers, enthusiastic amateurs and non photogs alike are interested in the techical apects of a shoot like the gear, filters and lighting you used. Diving into technical concepts is fascinating for readers.

Another element of technique is the physicality of any shoot. Tell the tale about how you balanced on the edge of a rooftop to capture the moment perfectly or the all night ride to that gritty location. It’s thrilling to us non-photographers.

3. Share your Mantra. State your creed!

Whether you’re a commercial artist or one solely dedicated to personal expression, you have a creed. You have a voice of your own that matters to readers. It’s interlaced with your imagery and you can weave it into the story you tell in newsletters. For readers, clients and even subjects, gaining a deeper understanding of your artistic goals is something that can elevate the experience.

So while you’re sharing visual poetry with clients, art lovers and anyone else, remember that the story behind the images is worth sharing too.

Here’s some other tips from Mad Mimi you might find useful:

Look At The Size Of That Image (http://blog.madmimi.com/look-at-the-size-of-that-image/)

5 Email Marketing Tips To Boost Engagement (http://blog.madmimi.com/5-email-marketing-tips-for-2013/)

4 Steps To Effective Email Marketing And Facebook Integration (http://blog.madmimi.com/facebook-integration-email-marketing/)

Dean Levitt is the Chief of Culture At Mad Mimi Email Marketing (http://madmimi.com).

So began my introduction to Heather Evans Smith‘s work.  I wrote right away and we began talking and emailing and figuring out where she was with her work and where she wanted to go.  We included this image in the Soar show, and things were rolling.

Flight (2012)

One thing led to another, and Heather decided to come to the retreat in New Mexico last month.  It was there that I realized not only is Heather super talented, we just may have been separated at birth.  You have to understand that at these retreats, we are holed up all day talking photo in the most intense knowledge crush you could imagine, so at down moments we can get really punchy.  So when I walked into the room and saw Heather doing a dance move straight out of my 10th grade jazz class, I fell in line and mirrored it.  We started jumping up and down, freaking out that there was another person in the world who knew this totally bizarre and complicated move, but neither of us broke stride either.  It was a seminal moment.

Enough embarrassing JSG’s newest addition, and more looking at her incredible images -

Collide (2012)

Wade (2012)

The Unraveling (2012)

We are thrilled to have Heather at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery!  Click here to view more of her work.

Ben Huff

Ben has a solo show of his series, Last Road North, currently on display at the Alaska State Museum until March 16th. Click here to see some installation photos of the exhibit. Last Road North explores the people and landscape of Alaska’s Dalton Highway – the northernmost road in America, constructed solely as a transportation route to serve the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay.

Kael Alford

Another artist, Kael Alford, is in the midst of a big museum show. Eye Level in Iraq is currently on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. It features Kael’s, as well as Thorne Anderson’s, work as unembedded photojournalists during the Iraq war. Its gotten a lot of press (rightly so) in publications like The Economist and San Francisco Chronicle. The show is up until June, and if you happen to find yourself in San Fran, we suggest you plan a stop to see these powerful images.

 Kathleen Robbins

Kathleen is a busy woman. She was featured earlier this week on Lenscratch for her In Cotton series. She has several shows coming up including the traveling group show, The Kids Are All Right, which her image “Asher on Belle Chase” graces the cover of the catalogue. The exhibit’s next stop is the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC in June.

Jeff Rich

Jeff’s series Watershed has travelled around to Asheville and Portland. Now it’s landing in Brooklyn at the United Photo Industries. The opening reception is this Friday from 6 to 9, and Jeff will give an artist talk on Saturday at 3 PM.  The exhibit runs through March 30th, and this is one you don’t want to miss, Brooklynites!

This Walk Away with Art will feature up-and-coming Atlanta artists, so it’s a great way to support the cause and meet local photographers!

Click here to purchase tickets.